If you can’t show off on your own blog, where can you?

A couple of years back, a friend from work was doing an AS level in photography in her spare time and was given a piece of coursework to complete over Easter. So she figured it’d be a good chance to have a girlie day out and we (me and some other work friends) could be her models.At first we were slightly apprehensive about exactly what we would be modelling… But she soon put our minds at rest and said we’d be going up to Avebury standing stones for the day to pretend to be fantasy warrior characters a la Lord of the Rings etc.

So one windy Sundy in April, Katja, Tess, me, and Keren (as shown in the piccie to the right) dug through the supplied sack of costumes to create ourselves as characters for the photoshoot. We spent much of the day running around fields with plastic swords (or, in my case, the extremely sharp dagger that you can see in the photo).

We had a great time but as the day went on, we got more and more tired and cold, which probably added some authenticity to the scenes.

The best of the photos are tagged avebury on Flickr. My friend passed her assessment and we all went along to the exhibition and felt just a little bit important as we wandered around and admired ourselves on display.

p.s. And while we’re on the subject, I quite like this one, which isn’t tagged as avebury but is the result of my friend more recently playing with her graphics package. I like the soft-focus, air-brushed effect.

Posted by Laura on 18-09-2007 at 08:09 pm
Tagged with: friends • history • photos
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Pompeii Live! (!)

I’ve just been watching Pompeii Live! on Channel 5. The Radio Times describes it as “a two-hour visit to the preserved city, wandering into bits never seen before by the public. Should be gripping.”.

‘Should’ being the operative word.

What a complete waste of an opportunity. Pompeii and Herculaneum are somewhere that I’d really love to go some time. So Pompeii Live! sounded worth watching…though I was a bit dubious about the title…

For a start, why does a programme about Pompeii need to be live? It’s been there nearly 2000 years - what’s going to happen in a couple of hours this evening that can’t be pre-recorded? Short of Vesuvius going off behind Peter Snow’s head while he’s on air. And I don’t think they can count on that.

Peter Snow isn’t too bad, though he doesn’t look very comfortable. Edwina Silver is irritating and patronising; she keeps ’summarising’ what the experts say (for us dumb viewers) but what she comes out with is less coherent, and her ad libbing is pretty poor. Both of them are overdoing the excitment.

What they’re seeing is exciting, but we don’t need breathless, sweaty, live presenters to get that point across.

Posted by Laura on 28-06-2006 at 08:06 pm
Tagged with: history • TV
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